Water was once perceived as a divine substance – infused with vital life-giving power. In medieval days a horse’s hair that fell into a stream was thought to transform into a worm.
The 20th century Romanian historian Mircea Eliade related this telling bit of information to drive home his point: it’s hard to imagine today just how much people once venerated water. For millennia the ailing traveled incredible distances to reach sacred springs and wells. Less than a century ago, FDR sought a cure in the curative waters of Warm Springs, Georgia.
In many creation myths a supreme being uses water as the instrument of creation. The Chewa of Malawi in west Africa believe the creator Chiuta lived in the sky until one day clouds formed into a thunderstorm. The first people, animals and vegetation appeared out of the rain. The Wishosk of northern California tell of the supreme being Gudatrigakwitl creating a thick fog that turned into all the beings of the earth.
The Qur’an says that Allah “made from water every living thing … ” (21:30) In the Book of Genesis 1:7, the Hebrew god created the sky on the second day by “separating the waters” – meaning the ocean from the clouds.
Shape-shifting water
Today we think of water as the liquid substance that runs in rivers, creeks and faucets, or falls in rain. Mist, fog and clouds are created from the condensation of water vapor. Ice, hail and rime are forms of frozen water; snow is crystalline and often clumps together. The discriminating western perspective divvies water up into its various forms, with handy definitions for each.
Until just a few centuries ago people perceived water as an entity capable of changing its form and shape, from a drop of dew to a raging thunderstorm. It was a miraculous substance that shape-shifted through all phases of the perpetual water cycle. From drifting mist to cumulonimbus clouds and finally to shattering claps of thunder and bright fingers of lightning reaching from the heavens, the gods shape-shifted.
Across cultures people sacrificed sheep, goats, cows and even white horses because they embodied clouds at the start of rainy season that needed to be ripped apart to pour out their lifeblood of water through sympathetic magic. As late 19th century scholar Andrew Lang wrote, dismembering an animal was “an imitation of what befell the god (in the sky)… ”
The home of the soul
Originating at the beginning of time in rising mist, the inherently creative water cycle was perceived as constant, uninterrupted and unstoppable. To immerse in water was to bathe in the eternal shape-shifting energies of transformation and revitalization. The water cycle was the home of the immortal soul. Numerous Celtic saints made a habit of wading out into rivers well past the waist and praying for hours, according to author Nigel Pennick.
About 5,000 years ago along the Yellow River in China there was a mythical book known as The Book of Power over Waters containing wisdom that allowed the shaman to change shape, travel under the ground and through the sky, according to Eva Wong’s Tales of the Taoist Immortals (Shambhala Publications 2001).
“(Water) dissolves into the realms of the Formless, and soars beyond the region of the Nebulous. It meanders its way through the rivers and valleys, and surges out into the vast wilderness … ” according to The Essential Huainanzi, a 2,200-year-old Taoist text first translated and published in 2012 by Columbia University Press. “Increasing and decreasing, draining away and filling up, it circulates without restraint into the immeasurable.”
The Chinese philosopher-poet Zhuang Zhou spent much of his life in the mountains about 2,400 years ago.
“There are spiritual people living on a certain mountain; their skin is like ice or snow, they are as delicate and graceful as virgins, they don’t eat grain but sip the wind and drink the dew,” he wrote. “Mounted on the energy of clouds, driving flying dragons, they travel beyond the seas, their spirits quiet, they prevent disease and cause the yearly crops to ripen.”
Shape-shifting trees
The natural response to cutting down certain trees is the growth of long, thin and flexible rods, the result of an ancient practice known as coppicing. Oaks, hazels, sycamores and ash trees were identified as world trees across cultures partly because of this feature, which was perceived as an example of miraculous transformational healing.
The tree’s response to injury may happen slowly over a period of years, but it’s still shape-shifting. If a human head is chopped off does it grow back as something else?
The Norse god Odin hung upside down for nine days in the branches of the ash tree Yggdrasil, which bestowed on him the inherent knowledge of shape-shifting and flight. Hesiod wrote that the flying and shape-shifting Zeus dwelt in the trunk of the oak tree. Hesychius called the shape-shifting Dionysus “the god in the tree.”
The ancient Siberians believed that souls perched like birds in the branches of the world tree, waiting to be reborn. Across cultures people once believed the ancestral animal soul of a given tribe lived underground near the root of the world tree. A common mythological image is a world tree with breasts that provide milk to rejuvenate the souls of the dead.
Reincarnation through the perpetual regeneration of the soul was at the core of the nature religions. To reincarnate is to change forms, to shape-shift. The Onondaga of the Iroquois nation believed all flesh was a temporary manifestation created by a shape-shifting power inherent in the universe.
Water as mirror
Staring into a bowl of still water to predict the future is called scrying, yet the concept is no different than staring at a crystal ball. Both water and transparent crystal refract or bend light, creating a fuzzy, soft and indistinct light that represented an entrance to the spirit world. Both water and crystal also create reflections – they were the precursors to the magic mirror.
Eyes also create a reflection and ancient cultures often associated them with mirrors – they were both windows to the soul, or spirit world.
Standing at the water’s edge of a still pond I might look down and say to myself, “I can see myself in the water.”
Five-thousand years ago someone kneeling at the edge of a still pond might see their own image and say, “It sees me.”
Among the clouds
Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623) studied at the Paoen Monastery in Nanking from age 12 to 28, then spent eight years on the sacred mountain of Wutai. He was known mostly for his philosophical essays and commentaries on Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian texts, but also wrote poetry. The following was written on Mount Lushan several years before his death.
Clambering up the Cold Mountain path …The long gorge choked with scree and boulders
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass …
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?
(Ben H. Gagnon is an award-winning journalist and author of Church of Birds: An Eco-History of Myth and Religion, released April 1, 2023 by Moon Books and John Hunt Publishing. Order here or at other booksellers. More information can be found at this website, which links to a pair of YouTube videos written by the author and produced by JHP.)
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